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How Far The Radeon Gallium3D Driver Has Come In Five Years

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  • #21
    Among my favourite moments:
    0. Spoke on a Linux day with some AMD representative and we talked about Laptops and how few there are and oh, well, ATI GPUs didn't fare so well with Linux. He had one there with an AMD ATI combo and smiled and told me something like "just you wait and see..."
    1. Specs release / freedom driver announced / radeonHD! OMFG! Heart attack!
    2. Introduction of power management (finally my HD3870 passive was actually able to be passively cooled, it was a 110 W TDP monster...)
    3. The first time my four cuddly penguins would show up in KMS mode.
    4. switch to HD5670 and it worked like a charm (til today)
    5. somewhere here was some game (can't remember which) that I bought via HIB and it would not work (command stream error) - a week later a new kernel came and it would just work. You could literally see and follow the development
    6. E-350 works nicely (I guess that was my first APU)
    7. gifted myself a Kabini Athlon 5350 (AM1) and it worked out of the box

    X. Each time I look at the RadeonFeature it becomes greener.


    Things I am still waiting for:
    * Geode driver improvements (yes, I do have a Geode LX). (I know it is a different driver but still somewhat related.)
    * A few bugfixes here and there (could also be related to something else in KDE or Qt).
    * HW video accel. I am not sure if it really works all the time. Had a few system freezes in the past when I tried things via VLC -> VDPAU -> driver/UVD -> somewhere it froze the whole system (sometimes even REISUB was dead)
    * Hybrid GPU stuff (e.g. APU and card)
    * Anything related to real world use of OpenCL and HSA would be fancy.
    * R100 improvements (I am happy that I finally found a Transmeta for my collection that comes with a usable GPU at all, before it was all XGI and such)
    * Support for future APIs (Vulcan and stuff, you know)
    * The moment AMD announces that the fglrx is dead and all people with be working on the freedom driver.

    * Notebooks with AMD APUs. Just someone make a decent model with a decent screen and a decent keyboard. Not this 2h runtime, 1366x786 glare screen mess and with strange keyboards (layouts) that are meant for hands of an alien maybe...
    * The next mainboard generation that works with Carrizo - I guess that is my next main box to be. If it takes too long I might still settle with a Kaveri >= A8 7600. For that I'd love to have some hybrid thingy with a dedicated GPU card.
    Stop TCPA, stupid software patents and corrupt politicians!

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    • #22
      Originally posted by SXX⁣ View Post
      So basically patches for tesselation on RadeonSI were around for many months, but there is multiple full-time AMD developers and they won't push them into mainline until they know something may not work on specific hardware for whatever reason. Nouveau have less full-time developers with limited access to GPUs so more bugs going to be fixed after code going live and somebody who own hardware report problems.
      Right, that makes a lot of sense.... Hadn't made that connection.

      Kudos to evryone, again

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      • #23
        Originally posted by SXX⁣ View Post
        Best answer for that is imirkin post there:


        So basically patches for tesselation on RadeonSI were around for many months, but there is multiple full-time AMD developers and they won't push them into mainline until they know something may not work on specific hardware for whatever reason. Nouveau have less full-time developers with limited access to GPUs so more bugs going to be fixed after code going live and somebody who own hardware report problems.
        I'm not sure if that explains everything... I'm probably a bit more trigger-happy than the radeon/intel devs (among other things, they do code reviews, etc, while I have no one to even review my code, so I just push), but nvc0 has supported ARB_gs5 since mesa 10.3 and ARB_fp64 since mesa 10.6. A lot of this "feature" functionality isn't that useful on its own, and when you have the docs it doesn't take a lot of time to implement. (Especially when another driver has trail-blazed ahead of you and figured out all the core/gallium bits.)

        FWIW nouveau patches for tessellation were around much longer than the radeonsi ones had been.

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        • #24
          Originally posted by SXX⁣ View Post

          So basically patches for tesselation on RadeonSI were around for many months, but there is multiple full-time AMD developers and they won't push them into mainline until they know something may not work on specific hardware for whatever reason. Nouveau have less full-time developers with limited access to GPUs so more bugs going to be fixed after code going live and somebody who own hardware report problems.
          Even then, they do have lots of alpha-testers and devs (gentoo/arch/... users)... I guess they could simply post the code and let people help them, no? Also... radeon devs find weird hardware bugs even after posting: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=60389#c64 , and fix them with the help of the users! Wonder why don't they just post stuff as early as possible...
          Last edited by asdfblah; 24 July 2015, 11:45 AM. Reason: s/quick/early/

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          • #25
            Originally posted by asdfblah View Post
            Wonder why don't they just post stuff as early as possible...
            Sometimes they push it earlier, sometimes not... sometimes they wait for kernel to got something, sometimes they wait for llvm to got something, etc...

            For example as Dave said GL_ARB_gpu_shader5 mesa radeosi part is basically there, but it waits for llvm fixes, etc... meaning he can probably pushed it right now to advertise 4.1, but that does not make sense as he knows it would be broken.

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            • #26
              Originally posted by eydee View Post

              The hardware itself doesn't support GL4.x, so even if the driver and mesa have it, it won't work on that card. It's a DX10/GL3 level card.
              Thank you for the explanation. I still hope to see little performance gains. It was that way also for DX 11 (atleast if you count the normal Benchmarks).

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              • #27
                Originally posted by BrollyLSSJ View Post
                Thank you for the explanation. I still hope to see little performance gains. It was that way also for DX 11 (atleast if you count the normal Benchmarks).
                GL 4 is feature level, it is not about performance gain... actually current mesa is slower even for earlier levels, because some of these new extensions recently aren't implemented in the best efficient way.

                At least on radeonsi i see on average -5 to -10% performance hit even on old software so even if those extensions aren't used, when compared to month old mesa.
                Last edited by dungeon; 24 July 2015, 02:02 PM.

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                • #28
                  Originally posted by dungeon View Post

                  Sometimes they push it earlier, sometimes not... sometimes they wait for kernel to got something, sometimes they wait for llvm to got something, etc...

                  For example as Dave said GL_ARB_gpu_shader5 mesa radeosi part is basically there, but it waits for llvm fixes, etc... meaning he can probably pushed it right now to advertise 4.1, but that does not make sense as he knows it would be broken.
                  Ah, I see, thanks for explaining... It's too bad that radeonsi depends on LLVM, feels like another restriction to development... OTOH, it's great when it works, I suppose.

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                  • #29
                    Originally posted by asdfblah View Post
                    It's too bad that radeonsi depends on LLVM, feels like another restriction to development...
                    When it comes to OpenGL and radeonsi, think of llvm as shader compiler... so no - it is not restriction to development, even if shader compiler is in mesa it would need fixes for this - either way it is not a time to push that extension before fixing shader compiler.

                    Hopefully this new Victor Vran ARPG will work, as it require right OpenGL 4.1




                    Last edited by dungeon; 24 July 2015, 04:05 PM.

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                    • #30
                      Thanks to all the devs for all the work!
                      I just hope r600g will have some GL4 love too :-)

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